Entrusting AI with Coding: 10-Hour Development Challenge
Employees from Various Departments Participate... 75 Teams Join
"A Starting Point for Everyday Collaboration with AI in Development"
On June 26, Kakao announced that it will hold its in-house development competition (hackathon), "2025 10K," at the Kakao AI Campus located in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province. This year's hackathon will feature a total of 75 teams and approximately 250 participants, including employees from a variety of departments beyond just development roles.
A hackathon, a portmanteau of "hacking" and "marathon," is a development competition in which developers and service planners participate individually or as teams to solve specific topics or implement their ideas as prototypes. Since 2013, Kakao has held its annual in-house hackathon under the name "24K," which stands for "24 hours for the crew (employees)."
Kakao planned this hackathon to spread a new collaborative approach and development culture within the company, allowing employees to experience high productivity in a short period of time using AI. For the first time, the company introduced "Vibe Coding," an AI-based development method, and significantly reduced the event duration from 24 hours to 10 hours. "Vibe Coding" is a new programming approach in which artificial intelligence (AI) performs coding tasks based on natural language commands.
Additionally, this year's 10K places a strong emphasis on rapidly turning ideas into MVPs (minimum viable products) by actively utilizing AI. Participants will use various AI tools to conduct short, three-hour development sprints, repeatedly transforming their ideas into prototypes and progressing their projects at more than twice the speed of traditional methods until the final results are produced.
AI is involved not only in the development process but also in the judging process. An AI model evaluates the completeness of the MVPs after the first development sprint, and these scores are reflected in the final evaluation.
With the introduction of Vibe Coding, this year's 10K saw participation from employees in a variety of roles, including planning, design, and business, in addition to developers. A total of 75 teams and over 250 participants took part, marking an increase in participation of more than 50% compared to last year and demonstrating high interest in the event.
Kakao CTO Jung Kyudon said, "This in-house hackathon was designed to provide everyone with the experience of turning their ideas into final products by working alongside AI tools as colleagues. Just as Kakao aspires to become an AI-native company, we hope this hackathon will serve as a starting point for a new development culture in which collaboration with AI becomes part of everyday work."
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